Ink Heart
by PoshBosch
Summary: Lucy would never of dreamed such an annoying, stupid book could keep cropping up in her life. When Solange gives Lucy a diary for her 17th birthday, she wishes it would just disappear, but when Lucy gets sucked into 16th century Britain, and nobody can see her, it's the only thing that she has left that connects her to her old life with the people she misses the most.
1. Chapter 1

**So you probably thought I'd abandoned this story in the fiery pits of hell but here I am updating chapter one because I was thinking about making it better. Plus, I just read it back to myself and realised how stupid, wrong, bad, and annoying it was. It would simply be a sin to leave it up without trying my very best to improve it. **

**And I'm sorry to all of you who thought it'd be Chapter 2 I'd written. I'm sorry about that. **_**Avariella**_**, one of my reviewers, suggested I try and write outside of Lucy's diary setting, so this is what I'm going to do.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own the Drake Chronicles. Alyxandra Harvey does. **

Lucy was sat at the Drake household curled up on the sofa under a blanket, with a nice, warm cup of mocha coffee sat on their mahogany coffee table. The Drake brothers – seven of them and one sister – had vacated upstairs upon the arrival of Lucy, who looked particularly agitated and frazzled when she's stormed through their door. They knew better than to be in her path when she was radiating that kind of darkness.

It had been her birthday the day before last, on the 16th of October. Now, two days later, she was still forced to set her eyes on the thing that seemed to be haunting her.

She was glaring at it over the top of her mocha. If that drink had been able to, it would have froze and hopped out of her way.

With a sudden cry of fury, she launched herself at the little black book and ripped it open. Once she'd dug around in her bag for a fountain pen, she began her furious scribbling.

_I'm not going to bother being polite. Frankly, I left polite alone a long time ago. Instead, I'm just going to be blunt, and mean, and maybe a little bitchy. _

_I hate you. I don't think I've ever hated anything as much as I hate you. _

_The only reason I haven't ripped you apart and thrown away the pieces is because of Solange. Unlike you, she's nice, and kind, and loyal. And my best friend. I can take anything she throws at me._

_Well… maybe not everything. You, for example, I can't handle. Especially when she literally threw you vile thing at my head and bolted out the door._

_Since then, naturally, I've tried everything to forget about you, thinking Solange couldn't have even stooped as low as she did that day. She knew with all her soul that I hated what you are and still she somehow thought I'd appreciate seeing you sitting there on my desk yesterday after she's somehow retrieved you from the back of my vanity where I'd stuffed you an hour after getting you, thinking I could forget the very memory of you. _

_Thanks for giving me the fright of my life, by the way. When I'd walked into my room and saw you sitting there all innocently and trying to look all sickly sweet with your leather binding, I almost jumped out of my skin. Every attempt I've had to hide you since that moment has been somehow foiled. I do it, and I feel, in my heart, that nobody can be clever enough to find you, and a couple of hours later you're just in front of me._

_Living in a house full of vampires, all with obscenely good tracking skills is always going to bite. A normal, logical person would think that they're to blame, but because I hate you with my very soul I just think you're out to get me. _

_And of course you _are.

Still sitting down, somewhat stiffly, Lucy huffed a sigh, blowing out her fringe. Her mocha coffee had chilled.

_Just think, what if any of the Drakes_ found_ you? Found you and actually started reading. They'd never let me live it down and it'd be all your fault._

_Being me, and because I really don't like to think all that often, the obvious solution to my problem is the only one I'm actually going to entertain. There are probably many more out there, but personally I like this the best._

_I'll just have to destroy you. _

_And being that I have paper and a pen handy in front of me, I'll just start my list of possible annihilations now. _

Lucy smiled evilly, placed the Diary down on a sofa cushion and went to pour her ruined coffee down the sink. She was in to good a mood about her list to let a little cold beverage bring down her mood. Throwing the take-out cup in the bin, she retrieved a glass and poured herself some water.

She took her first sip when she'd positioned herself back down in her seat. Clearing her throat, she set the glass on the table and picked up her pen.

_I've had a little time to think about what I'm going to put on this list. Trust me; you're not going to like them. _

_1) Burning you. _

_2) Ripping out your spine. (I bet that'd hurt.)_

_3) Staking you. (I have lots of them handy.) _

_4) Throwing you in a river._

_Yeah, I'm proud of that list. I bet if I were to actually think for a little while, I could come up with many more ways to dispose of you. In fact, I'm just going to add something on. _

_5) Exploding._

_But, when it comes down to it, I should just carry on writing in you. There's no point stopping now I've started, right? And I should just not kill you until later, because I've just thought of something genius, spontaneous, worthy of a Grammy. _

_6) Actually telling you my, hideous, backward, hippy lifestyle that I have in the Drake's farmhouse. _

_That's something I can put into action straight away which will require minimal effort. I'm all for number six. Let the torture begin._

Lucy was about to launch herself into her next painful sentence when she suddenly stopped. She tried again but her shoulders slumped instead. Nervously chewing on her lower lip, she tapped the end of her pen against the clean, lined page of her book.

_So…_

Now that she was actually trying to write down her thoughts, Lucy came up empty-handed. She had no idea how do it. Insults were her speciality, and now that she was no longer spitting them into its pages, she was at a loss.

_I've never done this before. What do I do? What the heck do girls put in your brothers? Maybe Jennifer King—_

Lucy growled at Jennifer King's name. She hated her almost as much as the diary.

_- has a Diary. What does she always talk (shout/brag) about to friends? Crushes? Boyfriends? _

_I can't back out now that I've started, although I really want to. Maybe go and spend some time with my boyfriend instead of wasting my time sitting here. I bet we could find plenty of things to fill the day with._

_Speak of the devil. _

Nicholas, after not hearing choice words being spoken for over half an hour, braved the first floor of his house that Lucy was occupying by herself. Hearing the slight thud of footsteps on the stairs, Lucy stuffed the Diary under a sofa cushion and turned, smiling.

"Hi," she said.

Nicholas came to sit beside her. As soon as he'd sat he started to squirm, feeling a hard object underneath him. "What—"

He shimmed and twisted himself until he held a small, rectangular book in his hands. Lucy, a look of dismay on her face, tried to snatch it off him. He evaded her easily, scrambling up to stand by a red velvet arm chair. A slight smile appearing on his face, he looked at his girlfriend quizzically.

"What's this?" he asked, waving the book in the air.

Lucy scrambled up next to him, horrified. "That's nothing."

He flipped it open, read a line successfully before he had to hold it above himself because Lucy had taken a run up and tried to grab it from his hands.

"_I'm not going to bother being polite. Frankly, I left polite alone a long time ago. Instead, I'm just going to be blunt, and mean, and maybe a little bitchy?"_ A pause for a moment. "Lucy, did you write this?" He asked slowly.

"No," she lied.

"It sounds like you."

Lucy sighed. She never could lie to Nicholas, especially now they were dating. "Just give it back, Nicky."

He looked at her for a minute, sighed, and threw it back to her. She caught it, threw it on the coffee table. "Thanks."

Smiling smugly, mischievously, he sauntered over to her, wrapping his arms around her waist. She leaned into him, and he met her half way. They did find other ways of spending the day, and they enjoyed their kissing immensely.

Two hours later, Lucy sat in the Drake's kitchen, leaning over their dining table, scribbling down her thoughts with ease, if a bit reluctantly.

She wrote about the Drake's blood changes, as much as she new about them anyway, how her and Nicholas had actually grown over the hate they first initially felt for each other, and how it had turned into love.

When she was just about finished and feeling satisfied, Quinn walked cautiously into the room, not knowing if Lucy was about to explode.

When she didn't immediately snarl at him, he assumed he was in a safe zone.

"What're you doing?" He rocked back on his heels, craning his neck to try and get a glimpse of anything worthwhile.

Lucy's head whipped up so fast it almost blurred. She stuttered out some pathetic sounds before throwing her arms and elbows over the book on the table, a light blush of surprise colouring her cheeks.

"I'll tell you what I will be doing in a minute." Her voice came out challenging. It was nothing like what she was feeling – mortification. "I'll be plotting ways to kill you if you take as much as a step closer."

Quinn raised an eyebrow. "Somebody's got something to hide, huh?"

Lucy pushed away from the table, thinking fast. "I need to get home."

Did she mention she's not so good at thinking?

Not waiting for a reply, she gathered her bearings and her stupid book and stumbled out of the door and into their drive. Still inside the kitchen, Quinn shrugged and got a bottle of blood from the fridge, deciding it probably wasn't worth the time.

Oh, how wrong he was.

If he'd have been smart, he would have followed her down the dirt lane leading away from the house, through the shadow of darkness that night bestowed, and into the forest that surrounded the Drake compound.

He would have seen Lucy making an effort to pick her way through carpets of ferns, mazes of thick trees and thickets of blackberry bushes. And he would have seen her eventually find her way and come to a huge, knotted oak tree.

She stopped at the bottom, shouldering her bag more tightly onto her shoulder. It didn't take her long to scale it and find the right handholds to place her limbs.

Hidden by a cloud of leaves, she got comfortable and dug around in her bag.

_Do you see what you've reduced me too?_

_I had to climb and put in an effort to lie to the people I actually like. I have no idea how I'm going to get down from this tree and I'll probably end up in hospital because of it. _

_Yeah, that's right. I've had to run and hide like some pathetic looser—_

The end of her sentence was spoiled when her pen pushed itself across multiple lines and slipped into a horrible pattern of scribbles. Lucy hadn't done this on purpose, and looked up in shock and confusion when the world wobbled.

It screamed much harder this time, making her drop the book and pen and her grip on the branch.

Her defenceless body tumbled down to the ground.

She had just enough time to see the ground racing up to meet her, and then a fiery cloud engulfed her in a whirlwind of dirt and leaves.

Once it had settled down again, and the ground was where it should have been, only Lucy's bag remained, sitting alone in the tree.

**I think this is much better, don't you? **

**Thank you for suggesting to me to write like this! It's really turned out well, I think. **

**I hope you enjoyed the new and improved chapter, then. It's been a pleasure. **


	2. Chapter 2

**I'm not going to say anything… Just - just don't kill me. **

**Oh, actually, I suggest, for those who haven't read the edit I've done for chapter one, for you to go back a chapter and read it. **

**It's a lot better, I promise.**

**This actually won't make that much sense without going back to read the new and improved chapter one. It'll only take a second!**

The fiery black hole opened up again a second later, dropping Lucy out in a tumble of flailing limbs. She landed with a particularly ungraceful thump, staying down, hugging the ground with everything she had, just grateful that she was still actually breathing.

A thin scattering of hay didn't make her body hurt any less, and the cold cobble-stone floor only caused discomfort.

Some part of her mind squealed in pleasure, though. Something other than a vampire war had finally pulled her in and it was safe to say that excitement, no matter how tiny, bubbled around in her stomach. The cold, expectant cloud of destiny hung over her too, but, Lucy being Lucy, just thought it was surprise. And surprise was there, just much more suppressed.

Ignoring the painful stab of needles in her temples, Lucy leaped to her feet. Her mind spun groggily.

Then Lucy froze. She'd finally noticed the thick iron bars on the one window, covered in years worth of coppery rust. And then the shackles and the chains trailing over the ground like metal snakes, the pile of hay, and a creaky looking bench attached to the wall by a pair of huge hinges.

This wasn't Violet Hill. If it was then the room belonged to an anti-organic smoothie cult looking for rebel action any way they could.

When Lucy was just about to chuckle at the thought, she noticed something that made her want to scream. A small book sat on the edge of the window, leaning nonchalantly against it. It had flashed into existence the same time Lucy had, dropped by the same cloud of green fire.

Lucy just couldn't get her head around it. Of all the things that could have come with her, it just had to be the thing she wanted the least.

Smouldering. That was what was happening to her. She was absolutely livid, burning with hatred. Never mind that she'd been dropped God knows where and she was all alone and never mind that a miracle had been performed. None of that mattered when that _thing_ had come too.

A jagged wooden door swung open beside her. She started, wrenched out of her thoughts, and then smiled.

Somebody had found her and was going to help her.

She was saved.

But the giggling couple waltzed straight past her. They swept around the room, filling up the dingy spaces with flashes of colour. Well, the male did. He wore a well-fitting deep indigo doublet with an equal set of intricately engraved silver buttons falling down the centre of the garment, glimmering proudly in the lone ray of buttery light falling in between the iron bars. It was embellished with a lavish pattern of silk embroidery, beautifully stitched by hand. An equally rich pair of breeches were worn up to the knee.

If that didn't scream wealthy nobleman, then it'd have to be the proud and sophisticated look her wore with his clothes that did.

The woman was considerably less flashy and obviously considered a peasant or a house maid. There were no shinning beads or any excess pattern on her dress that would draw attention. But there was a kirtle hugging her waist and falling freely to her ankles, square neckline on display.

Lucy stood in the middle of the room, staring deadpan at the display.

The man flashed a smile, pulling the women into a tight embrace, radiance beaming. "_Ma Cherie_, we are finally alone."

They looked strange together; like a sewer rat and an elegant gazelle forced to converse. But then again, Lucy thought anything would look bland next to him. He unintentionally sucked the life out of everything he passed but, at the same time, gave it back with a warm heart.

"Yes," said the woman, smiling slightly. "But we should get back. We don't want the guards to get ideas."

The man pulled her closer, stealing a kiss. "Let them have their ideas," he said, excitement blazing alongside recklessness.

Lucy still stood in plain sight. The couple could easily turn and see her any second, maybe even start to spit insults and obscenities at her for intruding on their stolen time together.

And even though the possibility of it drummed through her and every exposed instinct told her to leave, she approached them. First, it was cautiously like they were going to attack and then, when they didn't otherwise react to her presence, a lot faster. A trail of gold thread caught the light on the man's clothing, glimmered. Lucy walked around the couple, inspecting. Their faces were to close together to see any of their distinguishing features. What was exposed lay underneath the mask of shadow.

They still mumbled to each other, heads bent close. Nothing could squeeze through the gap between them, considering there was none.

Lucy jumped towards them.

Nothing.

Screamed right in their ears.

Nothing.

Skipped around singing 'Om Namah Shivaya', waving her arms above her head.

Not even a twitch from their direction.

Lucy stopped, panting. Her lungs were on fire, legs felt like jelly, wobbling like they'd turned to water. Energy was long gone, replaced by the sharp spike of adrenaline. But even that was gone now, leaving her feeling stupid and tired. The questions beat at her skull. She was just about strong enough not to let them take over, but the horrible feeling of panic gripped her instead. Why couldn't they see her? Why were they dressed like that? Who were they? Where were we?

The couple moved toward the door. Light finally feel upon them; Lucy could see their faces for the first time. Brown hair was set alight, shining bronze.

Lucy gasped. Her legs almost gave out. Really not wanting to see them any longer, she made a run for it. She made sure to grab her book. Tears ran blindly over her cheeks as she ran out of the door, feet almost slipping on the stairs leading up right outside. Finally, when she'd found a nice private cupboard under another set of stone stairs, she slammed the door shut on herself and allowed herself to collapse against it.

Unbeknown to Lucy, the room was filled with crates. They were staked much higher than her head, towering over her in a sea of expensive wood. The walls were cold stone, like opal shells, with no windows. It was small and safe for Lucy, who'd just found herself in an alien world, meeting two people she'd of never expected to have seen. Of course she'd have to find another place to hide when the servants came to take the crates to the kitchen, but that felt like such a long time in the future that it didn't bother her.

Lucy's tears made dark spots over the pages of the book, looking like splodges of ink. She sat hunched, diary resting on her knee. Maybe she didn't want to write in it, but nobody could see her, and those people – Lucy shuddered, choked on another sob.

_Oh, God. How? How can those two be here? They even look like themselves, but she doesn't have scars or tattoos, and he isn't wearing his frock coat. But it's impossible, isn't it? I'm so confused, and really frightened. I guess it wouldn't have been so bad if they could see me. Maybe they'd even recognise me?_

_Oh, who am I kidding? They barely looked like themselves, how could they have known who I was?_

_Maybe…_

Lucy's brow furrowed. She wiped away her tears.

_Maybe this is all before the French revolution. But that would mean I'm in France, and he's in France. But I can't be in France, can I? I've never even been abroad so how can I be in France? I don't believe in magic, however much Isabeau says that her Hound tribe uses it. _

_I could be in the middle of the French Revolution. Oh, God. _

_I'm not! I can't be! I'm still in Violet hill, I have to be. But that wouldn't explain why they couldn't see me. It has to be..._

_To be…_

_To be… what?_

_It has to be what?_

_Some tremendous trick? A hoax? The people in Violet Hill aren't like that. They would never pull such a horrible trick, would they? They would never put the people I know in that situation, never mind that they would never agree to it anyway. _

_But that just doesn't explain how they can be here. It's impossible, considering I don't even know where I am myself. Somewhere with cold stone and chains and horrible smelling places. Somewhere I don't want to be, that's for sure. _

Lucy's lower lip wobbled again, about to give in to a new fresh wave of tears.

_But people can't see me. How am I going to get home, wherever home is? _

_It must have some significance, right? That they're here? And that I've seen them and that they shocked me. And that they look exactly like they do in Violet Hill. _

_Right?_

Right?

_I can't have just been sent here without a purpose. Without something to do, to change maybe? Perhaps it's supposed to be them that I have to change. And anyway, despite the way I felt when I saw that it was them, they did, underneath the shock, make me feel closer to home. And I want to be as close to home as I possibly can be, considering I'm not there now._

_What do you think?_

Lucy smiled watery at herself. Had she just asked what an inanimate object thought of something?

_I'm already going mad, aren't I?_

_Yeah. Probably. _

_So maybe I'll follow Logan and Isabeau. Maybe I'll see what they do, why they're secretive, why they're actually here. I can't think of anything else to do with them. _

_I just have this feeling though. _

_This big feeling. It feels as if I'm going to do something, something important, and everything else is going to change. _

**Oh, my God, I'm actually finished! That feels really good. **

**I hope you can forgive me for leaving this at the bottom of the barrel. Actually, I was going to delete it, but had last minute inspiration. Plus, I'd probably regret it if I ever did delete it. **

**I really hoped you enjoyed. **

**Oh, in case you didn't read the edit of chapter 1, go and do it! It's important!**


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